ABOUT A BRIGHT AND UNUSUAL BOOK Soviet military assistance to young African states in the 1960s-1990s... This topic has always been with us and still remains one of the most "closed". We knew that we were helping African states in their struggle for independence - we were sending weapons, sending military advisers - but what they were doing there, how they lived, how they interacted with the local population and the national armed forces, what benefits they brought - this was always discussed sparsely and inaudibly on radio and television, in newspapers and magazines and indistinct. It is not an exception in recent times, when the opinion often spreads that helping countries that were freed from colonialism, the Soviet Union was just "wasting money". Meanwhile, tens of thousands of our military and civilian specialists were working in African countries at that time. For example, only in the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria (ANDR) from 1962 to 1991, more than 10 thousand Soviet servicemen, including more than 400 conscripts, were on long-term business trips. Their work was not easy and extremely risky. On the Algerian-Moroccan and Algerian-Tunisian borders, our sappers neutralized about one and a half million mines, cleared more than 800 km of mine-explosive strips and cleared about 120 thousand hectares of land from the deadly "stuffing". The Algerian army was equipped with 90% of our weapons, about 4 thousand. Its officers were trained in the Soviet Union. These figures are given in the book " Memoirs of participants in providing assistance to the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria (1960-2000s,)", published in the publishing house "Vse Mir" in 2013 and prepared at the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences (editor-compiler Candidate of Historical Sciences A. A. Tokarev). The book is small in volume - it contains 164 pages, containing the memories of 15 participants in our country's assistance to Algeria in different years. Most of the au ... Read more